


Stitching Up Boys

by Edoro



Series: Organized Crimestuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Child Abuse, Cults, Drugged Sex, Drugs, Dubious Consent, F/M, Genital Torture, Gore, M/M, Mutilation, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:11:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which young Church ward Gamzee Makara is finally old enough to be officially initiated into the ranks of the subjugglators.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please, _please_ mind the warnings. The triggering material in this fic is all pretty graphically described, so if those are things you're sensitive to, read at your own risk.

You wake up sweat wet and with the sheets sticking to you like someone dumped water in your bed. It’s high summer and the air outside is still as death and twice as stale, hot and muggy like to choke the motherfucking life out of anything that tries to live, but you’re cold-blooded enough you usually never get this uncomfortable. You give some thought to dozing all sleep-dazed in bed, but it’s sticky and soggy and you’re hot enough the floor sounds more inviting, and anyway an acolyte’ll be poking their head in soon to shake any stragglers up awake and you don’t want to get dragged, so you get up.

Getting dressed turns into a chore. Your clothes all stick too and you feel a flash of irritation as sudden and intense as a summer flood when you have to jump and wiggle into your pants, the fabric sticking nastily on your thighs.

Karkat’s sitting already dressed on his bed, thumbing through one of those soppy novels he pretends what he doesn’t love, shooting you looks over the top of it. “You smell weird,” he announces to the room just as you get your shirt all buttoned up, and that lightning flash of anger is back again, there and gone almost before you feel it. The afterimage burns up in your chest, though.

“Took a bath just last night, best friend.” You raise your arm and give yourself a sniff, anyway, just to be sure. Nothing unusual there, sweat and skin and maybe you’re a little sharper than normal, but you spent all night swimming in your own sweat pool so you think you can be forgiven that. Anyway, there’s incense up in every room and you’re not half as ripe as some of the warmblooded brothers here get. “Ain’t catching anything nasty with my nasals.”

“Of course you can’t smell _yourself_ ,” Karkat says, all eye-rolling exasperation. You think about flipping his book into his smart little mouth and go paint your face on instead. “I guess it’s not bad though, so whatever.”

Then it’s off to early evening service for you two and then schoolfeeding and on the way the memory of that just falls out the hole in the back of your pan. It’s some kind of relief because you’d been starting to get antsy at how angry he made you, wondering why you suddenly got all those salty feelings up inside you.

You keep feeling nug-muzzy all day long though, up behind your eyes like some motherfucker stuffed cotton all in there while you weren’t looking, and weird in your skin. It slides like it wants to catch on your bones wrong, like you don’t fit it anymore. You get cracked across the horns three times for fidgeting too much in class. By the time lunch comes you don’t want a single thing more than to just go lay back down on the cool stone floor of your room and sleep for the rest of the night and day. All the smells up in the cafeteria are more like to making you nauseous anyway, and you poke listlessly at the slop on your nutrition platter before pushing the whole thing over to Karkat.

“I got any shit on the back of me anywhere?”

“What? No, I don’t think so. Why?” Karkat starts in shoveling both your lunches into his face like maybe he’ll drop dead if he doesn’t eat them both _right now_ , and even as weird as you feel that’s still cute as fuck.

“Motherfuckers be getting their stare on at me like it’s going out of style or something.” It’s made you feel even more uncomfortable. You can feel a few people staring even now and you hunch up, like a shellbeast, dropping your head into one hand. “I don’t feel too motherfucking hot, best friend.”

“You’ve probably got a cold or something.” Karkat shrugs. “Try not to give it to me.”

You didn’t think you felt sick or anything, but maybe it is a fever getting you all hot itching inside your bones. “If I get sick, are you gonna take care of me?”

He rolls his eyes but smiles at you just a little. “Of course. Someone’s got to make sure you don’t choke on your own miserable vomit, right?”

You reach out and brush the fingers of your other hand over his cheek, smiling back, and you figure everything should be okay even if you do end up sick as a barkbeast.

The next day you feel about the same except tenser, every muscle in you drawn all up like you’re about ready to run, which doesn’t make any sense because what have you got to run from here? It’s just Karkat in your room and everywhere else is just the same cold stone and faces you know. Not like back on the home planet like you’ve always been told about, where kids grow up on their own and have to fight their whole lives just to live.

Every time someone gets too close you get tenser, all up your back and down your stomach and in your legs, and there’s a weird ache starting up somewhere in your guts at the end of the day that you don’t have any understanding of but don’t like. You don’t feel like any kind of sick you’ve ever been before and it’s almost starting to scare you, because you keep being hot and wrong and itching down in your horns and bones and you feel like you’re waiting for something to happen, some kind of big old motherfucking thing that’s you don’t even know what. It wants to rise up out your skin and you don’t know what it is, you can’t feel the shape of it, and it makes you all squirmy and nervous.

The day after that you wake up with Karkat a warm lump molded against your side, and you’d be mad at how much hotter he’s making you except he’s got his dry lips against your neck and then he’s licking you, tongue wet and warm and rasping up over the pounding line of your pulse. You can’t do a single motherfucking thing except tilt your head over and whimper for it, the arm he’s laying on coming up to pat at his shoulder and back wherever you can reach. 

You both sleep naked as the day you were hatched and you’re pressed chest to chest, his legs all up against yours, but you need more of him right now. You need all of his skin up on you, need to get all up in his skin, need those little square hands rubbing over you. Mostly you need his mouth to keep doing what it’s doing, with that clever fucking little tongue licking long stripes up your neck.

He gets all on you, straddling your hips and kissing your throat, and it’s a hard fucking decision to bare it to him instead of looking up at him. You’re not sure why this even feels so good, why it doesn’t just feel weird and kind of gross like you know it should, but you figure you gotta roll with a miracle like this. The way he feels on top of you is satisfying like a long cold drink after a long hot day. Your hands come up mostly of their own will and grab on his shoulders, stroke down his back, and your mouth is all sighing out his name all plaintive-like with every lick.

The bottom of your stomach keeps dropping out like it’s on a string, up and down and up and down. It’s making you dizzy in a real good kind of way. You think you could get used to this, you could get some understanding on to why you like this so much, and then Karkat sits back right on your hips and you can’t hardly even think for a second.

You both look at each other, your face flushed hot and his looking a little red too, and you open your mouth to say something but then somehow end up kissing him instead, hands tangled up in his hair. It’s all hesitant slide of wet lips and teeth clicking together because you’ve never kissed a motherfucker on the mouth before, never even really thought much about it before right now, but you get kind of the way of it and slide your tongue up between his teeth because you’ve read in his novels that that’s how you do it. 

He tastes good, not like anything really but Karkat. His teeth are all slippery and sharp against your tongue and you cut yourself on one of them, both your mouths filling with the taste of blood, and that makes him make a noise that makes something in your stomach squeeze like it’s about to fucking pop.

You keep thinking of this disjointed phrase you read in one of Karkat’s books, _his searing kiss was as languid as a summer night_. It’s right, it’s motherfucking perfect. You think of sitting out at night watching the stars come out and putting your head in Karkat’s lap and him pretending like he doesn’t want to scratch around your horns and it’s just like that, how big and slow and soft everything is. It’s just like that. You think you love him.

He keeps breaking the kiss to lick your lips and neck and shoulders, his tongue all tickle fluttery on your skin, and it keeps making you squirm and laugh and dig your claws into his back maybe harder than you should, but he’s not complaining so you figure it’s okay. You’re even hotter than you were when you woke up. You feel almost like you’re on fire inside, like it’s going to burn away everything in you until you’re hollow and you just fall in on your own self in soot and ash grease, but you can’t even care. It burns good.

He kisses you until you’re both making little clicky chirpy noises up into each other’s mouths, sounds you aren’t sure you could even make yourself make later. You both move around against each other a little, you wiggling where you’re framed by his legs and arms and him kind of pressing down against you and somehow the sweaty slide of your skin feels good instead of just sticky and annoying. You think you might want to kiss him forever. 

It’s getting pretty hard to think, actually. It’s getting pretty motherfucking difficult to pay a shred of attention to anything that isn’t Karkat’s tongue in your mouth or the places where his skin touches yours. Maybe he’s the one on fire, because you’re so hot where he touches you. You want it all over so you melt under him.

You don’t know what you want. You want his hands but you don’t know where or how, just that if he doesn’t start to touch you the way you need him to soon you might go completely insane.

Then suddenly he’s being pulled off of you. For a moment you don’t even know why or what or that he’s gone, really, just that no one’s kissing you or pressing down on top of you, and then you start to be able to kind of see again and there’s a greenblooded acolyte standing there with his shoulders clasped in her hands, looking like she doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or get pissed.

You prop yourself up on your elbows and whoa, you are fucking shaky, your whole body is just kind of shivering and trembling and your voice isn’t doing much better. “Give him back,” you tell her, trying to be all imperious like you’re a subjugglator. You’re not yet, but she’s just a greenblood and you get to wear your own personal face around, so she should get her listen on to you if you lay down some righteous orders, but she just chuckles and pushes Karkat towards his bed.

“Both of you get dressed. Makara, come with me.”

You do it all as sullen as you can, being slow on purpose just to spite her, but you can’t stretch it out that long and soon enough you have to leave. As soon as you get up and start moving around you come into the realization that there’s a wicked ache all down between your legs. It’s hot and wet and throbbing like it hurts, except mostly how it feels is like you’d really like to have Karkat touching you there.

You go with her and try to tell yourself to remember to ask him if he will before you to go to sleep tonight, and see if you can maybe get some kissing in, too. It makes your stomach twist like maybe you’ll be sick and you vengefully hope you will, right on her feet, but it just keeps twisting and twisting tight until you ache there too and you mostly feel miserable and sweaty and like you might up and die if you have to wait all day to get him kissing you again.

Your rude-blooded bitch guides you down to the mediliquidator’s office. There’s a stirring of worry up inside you now, curling like a basket of snakes all in your stomach with everything else you still feel. You’ve never been down here a time your whole life except for once when you tried to climb up a tree and fell and cracked your dumb nug right open and got a line of stitches neat as you please over one eye. They don’t cull wigglers for getting hurt, mostly, but there’s a sister in one of your classes you remember came down with something wicked unchill and never came back after they dragged her phlegmatic, wheezy ass down there.

You try to pull your distant thoughts back together to pay attention, just in case they are talking about culling you, but you’re still too hot and squirmy and there’s still some kind of aching need you don’t even know how to fill, like someone carved you out hollow between the hips, and you can’t get your focus on to anything. The greenblood talks to a couple of people and then you get pulled into an office and your glutes parked on a steel table, cold through the fabric of your pants, with edges that bite into your thighs.

You’re just about thinking culling would be better than being this fucking _bored_ when the mediliquidator comes in. He’s a big blue motherfucker with corkscrew horns that nearly brush the ceiling, done all up in black and turquoise and a big white medic’s coat. You’ve been raised up around adults your whole life, but you’ve been schoolfed what the fear of them is an instinct when you’re little, and you think you’ve gotten the knowing of that now because of how fucking bigger than you he is. You squeeze back a little on the table and feel small as a fleck of flea shit while he looks you over, nostrils flaring.

“Take your clothes off, boy,” he orders you all gruff-like, turning away to rifle through a cabinet. You stare dumbly at his back.

“What?”

He doesn’t spare you a second glance. “I said take your clothes off. Shirt, pants, underclothes, everything, get it off.”

You start in on your shirt buttons even while you ask him why you gotta do something like that, what’s he wanting to see your skin for. It’s not that you’re body-shy or anything, but you feel even softer and littler with all your threads off and nothing between you and the room but your skin.

He doesn’t give you an answer, just gets himself a pair of gloves and pulls one on, then pushes you flat on your back when you’re naked. The metal of the table is a motherfucking balm to your hot skin and your eyes slide shut, just for a second, until you feel his bare hand nudging your legs apart and then they fly right back open.

You prop yourself up on your elbows to get a good look at what he’s doing, which seems to be touching all up on your junk like he’s got any fucking right to. You try to wiggle away and he swats your thigh like you’re a fucking wiggler and you can feel the angry flush right up to the tips of your ears.

His gloved fingers sweep up between your legs and over the slit there, and this time when you get to squirming it’s not away but just any way, because what should just be skin like anything else feels so sensitive you almost want to whine. He touches you all soft and quick and no-nonsense but he’s still stroking your crotch and it feels so _good_.

Then he presses a finger against you where you feel wet and it sinks down, and in, and you cannot even think of fucking helping yourself. You twist and squeak and nearly squeal. It feels so fucking good it hurts, his finger a huge blunt pressure and the glove all catching on delicate inner skin nothing’s ever touched before, and it feels all kinds of motherfucking _wrong_. 

This blue-blooded motherfucker’s two shades away from dark green and you haven’t even seen him before in your life and he’s got all kinds of liberties taken here, he is taking the most flagrant fucking liberties, he is making trespass on your motherfucking _body_. He’s got his finger in your insides, pushing it as deep in as he can, and the very worst part is that even though it hurts and you hate it it feels so good that your mind is stuttering. Your breath and pulse come up all loopy and dizzy and you can’t make your hips stop their aimless pitching or your thigh muscles stop twitching. 

Then he pulls it out, the white latex all slicked with translucent purple. You feel empty as a chasm, hollow as an eggshell. Humiliated tears prick at your eyes and you blink them away hard, biting down to keep the sob in your throat. You snap your legs together like there’s magnets in your knees and sit up, scooting your ass away from him and trying not to think about how good the press of your thighs feels.

He’s not paying you any mind anymore, back turned and pen scritching on paper on the counter. The glove is in the trash. You catch a little glimpse of purple again and your stomach turns over and this, at least, you get your recognition on as sickness.

“Get dressed,” he says, and watches without really looking at you while you do. Your hands are all heavy and clumsy and your skin is tight again, your whole body acting like it’s up and fuck and forgotten how to even move, but you get there. You feel better dressed.

He sweeps out of the room with an indication such that you should make to follow him, and you do, trying to ignore the wobble of your legs. You’re handed back into the greenblood’s custody. A wave of relief sweeps over you and you suddenly almost feel like wanting to cry again, like you’re a wiggler and she’s your toy that just got given back. You chomp down on your bottom lip until you taste blood and it mostly passes.

She gets given an armful of papers and takes you in hand again to sweep you off who even fucking knows where, and you put your foot down. You dig your heels in. You are tired of being dragged around without a motherfucking single peep about why or where.

“Where are we up and going now?” you ask, stopped still in the middle of the hallway. She’s trying not to look exasperated and not doing very well. Your voice is shaking and you don’t even care. You still feel trespassed on in the worst way and it’s shaking all up from between your legs to your squawk box and you don’t give a single solitary half a fuck if she can hear it.

“We’re going to go talk to some priests. I can’t really tell you much, it’s not my duty.” Her face goes a little soft and she gives your arm this gentle tug like hey, wanna come along? instead of the follow me yanking she’s been doing. You step to like the sullenest quackbeast but you do it. The priests are all basically good motherfuckers and you like them and you bet none of them will stick any fingers up inside you.

The room she takes you to is one of the serious ones, a little dark place off the edge of a chapel with blood tapestries up on the walls and incense curling through the air, the deep musky kind like you use in services and meditation, not the weaksauce light shit up in the rooms to make you sleep easy or the sharp note that gets keeps your concentration on during schoolfeeding. It’s heavy in your nose and lungs and almost makes you want to sneeze.

You sit on one of the prayer benches and squirm a little. You’ve never done good left up on your own and your patience is at an all time fucking low right now, it’s the opposite of what you’d call _motherfucking existing_ , and you have half a mind to get strident at some motherfuckers if you don’t get some information in your pan soon.

The heavy shit in the air isn’t helping with your problem, either. Your shirt’s all stuck under your arms with sweat and you feel hotter than before, especially when you realize squirming feels pretty good and if you move just right you can rub up on the lip of the bench. That’s basically like a little motherfucking miracle right there, that little wooden bump. If you weren’t worried about getting caught up looking like a silly undignified motherfucker you’d lay down and try to rub it in the seam of your slit - _like his finger did_ you think before you can stop yourself. A hard shiver wrenches down your spine and you don’t want to think about that anymore.

You don’t get left to your lonesome much longer. Two priests come up in and sit across from you, big indigo motherfuckers with their faces painted like skulls and one of them with some wicked etchings up on her horns, which you’ve always thought was cool as shit and wanted to do one day.

All the sass thoughts you’ve been having dry up before you can squawk them out to these sisters, and so you just sit and look and wait for them to get their talk on. The priests are always real fucking good about making you get your understand on to shit you think you can’t even get, so you can almost be patient. You manage to quit squirming, at least.

You three all exchange some greetings, all proper like, and then they get down to filling your aurals with some righteous fucking information. They drop it all slow as you please so you get every beat, and it is some heavy shit to be wrapping your pan around for sure, some pump-shiveringly serious stuff.

The news is, what’s going on is that at six sweeps and some change you’ve just hit your first heat cycle, which makes sense about all the weird feelings you’ve been getting up in yourself as of late. And you’ve been taught what follows from that before, but they tell it to you again, how when an indigo brother gets into his first cycle he gets a choice all laid down in front of him.

There’s a ritual, an induction ceremony of most serious sacred importance, that gets done to such a troll when they’re of the proper age. You’ve learned a little of what it is, in secret lessons with the handful of other indigos in this branch of the Church, and now they lay bare its entrails for you, pull out all the details out of it. They steal the mystery and hand your pan knowledge.

A subjugglator has no quadrants, no concupiscence in his heart, no base motherfucking desires for another troll’s flesh parts. A subjugglator is married to the Church and will serve and love only the Church for all his days. Violence is the pleasure a subjugglator takes, killing his climax, blood the only material he will splash into a pail. They have taken vows, all your holy family, but not just vows in writ like you always thought. They take their vows in flesh and make their fealty in pain penance. They spend their first cycle getting the only pailing they ever will, to make sure the caste keeps, and then they give themselves to Church service and they never can again.

Your choice now is to say yes or no. If you say yes then you’ll go on to your ceremony and give your first true allegiance to the minstrel messiahs of your faith lobes. The allegiance of holy mutilation is your fealty to them forever after, because you can’t take it back, and you can’t take that vow if you don’t mean it in every inch of yourself because that is the most flagrant heresy anyone can ever get to performing. It’s defilement of the messiahs and the Church and every teaching of pain you’ve ever been gifted.

If you say no, then you’re nothing. You are flea dirt, you are rat leavings, you are the scum on top of dirty water a barkbeast wouldn’t lap if he lay dying in the street. You are antithesis to everything you’ve been raised to be and all the beauty that flows in your own veins.

Your sisters start to say you can have time to think about it, but you’ve known what your answer would be since practically you were even motherfucking hatched. This is what you were even motherfucking hatched for, the only reason your dumbass self ever climbed out of his shell. It’s serendipity. You are for the Church and the Church is for you and you can think of no other that you’d rather give your allegiance to than your family and your messiahs. You can’t think of any other allegiance you’ve even got to _give_ than what’s already due them, if it comes to that.

So you tell to them yes, motherfucking yes, you are as ready for this as it’s possible for a brother to be. They both smile all pleased and fond at you, and the sister with the art up on her horns reaches out to take your face and kiss on your forehead, calling you a precious little thing. You don’t know if it’s being in heat or the incense or both, but the touch of her palms feels like about the best thing you’ve felt all day and you nuzzle up into them. She lets you for a second, then pulls away.

The other subjugglator peels off to go arrange arrangements and talk to people, because these things need some setting up. The sister with the horns takes you by the hand and pulls you to your feet, nudging you in front of her and then guiding you deeper into the bowels of the building with one light hand on your shoulder. The passageway you go through is narrow and lined with tapestries and smoky. It’s barely lit, too, darker than you’re used to ever having to try to see in, but your eyes get adjusted soon enough. 

You crane back to look up at her while you’re walking and she gives you this funny little twisty look back, one mouth-side and eyebrow all quirked up. “How’s that feel? Gettin’ your horns done like that.”

Her laugh is low and husky. “Kind of tickles. You think you want etching work gotten done on you?”

“Aw, shit, maybe someday, it’s bitchtits.” This time you laugh with her, even though you don’t think it’s really funny, except right now you kind of feel like everything is funny. You don’t know that you’ve ever breathed in this much smoke at one time for so long and it’s making your head feel funny, like it’s growing bigger on the inside and getting swoopy. You think if you closed your eyes you’d probably fall over and almost do just to see, but you bet your sister here wouldn’t get her appreciation on to that much so you don’t.

Eventually the two of you come to another room. It’s a bare fasting kind of room, no dresser or chests in it or nothing but the bed and wall hangings, not even any incense burning in the room proper. The scent of it is still thick from the hall, but the air feels lighter in your lungs.

“Make yourself comfortable. You’ll probably be here a few hours before anyone gets on back to you.” She looks like she might want to say more, mouth getting all twisty again, but she just looks at you for a little and then leaves.

You do a circuit of the room to look at the wall-art, but it’s nothing much special and you get bored of that quick enough. The bed looks inviting as all get out and you flop right in it, sighing a little. You’re pretty tired for a motherfucker what’s spent most of the day sitting and who just woke up a couple hours ago, but you don’t got much to do in the meantime so you figure no one will get salty with you if you take a nap.

You strip your clothes off to get all cool between the sheets, because it’s seriously motherfucking warm down here. Maybe any other time you’d be getting cozy, but apparently they call it heat for a motherfucking reason.

Mind getting all drowsy already, you think soft thoughts about touching yourself. No one’s going to be back for a few hours, probably, and everything that touches your skin feels so nice you roll yourself over in your sheets a few times and wiggle just for the hell of it, giggling like you’re some kind of stoned-ass brother. You guess you probably are.

You lay on your stomach and rock your hips down against the bed, lazy and half asleep about it, before deciding that yeah, you think you wanna give that a go. So you roll on over and kick out the sheets until they’re in a nice pile around your feet and not constricting anything, and skim a hand down your stomach to your crotch. You finally get a feel on yourself, almost ginger like you’re afraid of breaking it or something, and you really wish you could bend enough to look at it right because it feels _weird_.

Your shit’s supposed to be all tucked up nice in a tight little slit up there, but it’s all spread out kind of like a flower, with these little fiddly wet folds tucked up in between the lips you’re used to. The folds are all slippery and feel all kinds of nice to touch, so you just trace them for a while, pushing the skin this way and that with your fingertips, moving inwards all gradual until you hit another slit. Experimentally, you press, and your finger sinks down into yourself and it’s wet and slick and hot and you moan, you can’t even help it, this high weak little sound you almost blush to hear yourself make.

Before it even feels too good, though, the image of the mediliquidator flashes back into your head and everything between your legs kind of spasms and tightens up unpleasantly, like flinching back from a flame. Suddenly your finger feels too big and rough inside yourself and you yank it out, catching a fold with your claw and not even caring at the sudden sting. You wipe your hand off on the bed and squirm a little, like you can move away from that dirty crawling feeling, but it stays tucked right the fuck up under your skin and in all your soft new folds.

You curl up on your side with your hands tucked up against your chest and decide to just sleep. You’ve got all kinds of exhaustion settling in all cottony behind your oculars and it’s nice to close ‘em and drift. Hard to actually get past drifting, though, with all the shit up in your head. You’re all antsy up in your chest about this whole ritual shit so you can’t hardly even breathe, and every time you start to feel a little calmer it hits you again that you’re really _doing_ this.


	2. Chapter 2

You guess you must finally fall asleep though, because next thing you know someone’s got you by the shoulder and is shaking you. Sleeping in the middle of the night has you all discombobulated and you don’t hardly even know what’s going on when you sit up.For a second you think you’re back up in the room you share with Karkat, and then for a second you feel all kinds of motherfucking bad because you up and nearly forgot about him, and then you remember where you are and what’s going on.

Your sister with the horn-etchings is up in here. You get your ass up out of bed and start to reach for your clothes, but she stops you and hands you this slip of dark fabric instead. It’s like the robes the most rawest of new initiates wear, plain black and unadorned, but all slippery and gauzy instead of thick like those. You can still see most of your skin through it when you pull it on, but it’s all nice and cool and you like the feel of it swishing against you when you walk.

She drops some more knowing into your pan as you follow her down another tight little tapestry-lined corridor. There are some motherfuckers what swear their allegiance to the Church who got their specialty up in doing this, she says, who’ll pail you red and blackways ‘til you can’t squeeze hardly another drop of slurry out your sorry husk and then send it on home planetside for the Mother Grub. You try not to let on as to how the idea is giving you some strange nervous shivering in your gut, but she gets it anyway and gives your shoulder a little squeeze, all reassuring like.

“Don’t worry too much about it. Not like you can fuck it up or anything. Heh. And anyway, you really don’t remember it much. They’ll get you all good and fucked up out your head to make the mixture more potent and afterwards it mostly feels like some weird motherfucking dream.”

“Wasn’t any worry in me,” you say, but you feel a little better anyway.

The room she takes you to is all flickering shadows and muted wall-weavings, the floor all gloss and lacquered blood patterns. The only light is candles set in the walls and it bounces off the floor until it almost looks like you’re walking on water, on some strange and shifting sea. You nearly stumble on your way over to the room’s central fixture, a sprawling concupiscent couch big enough for probably six or seven motherfuckers to get up on at once.

She indicates you are to park your ass on that and park you do, leaning against the soft back. She beats it back out of there and then you’re alone again, with the lights and shadows and your own thoughts. They’re like the light too, flicking all wild and quick and refracted crazy in your pan, bouncing from this to that to who even motherfucking knows what. You’re excited and nervous and fluttering and you’re glad you have the couch to lean back against because you don’t know that you could stand up right now, all shakes all the way down to your toes.

You’re there alone just long enough to get to wondering what it’s gonna be like and maybe getting a little worry in about it before the motherfuckers you’re to give your bucket service to come filing in.

They’re all the purplest blues, every one of them, up so high there’s barely any difference between your color and theirs, except for one brother who you would fucking swear up and down is seatroll violet. Higher than you, that’s for fucking sure, and it’s weird to see a color like that.

They fill up the room and the room fills up with the scent of them, mostly just troll but with this undercurrent you don’t have any knowing of, something musky and low that walks shivery little insect feet up and down your spine. It gets you right in the tight knot of heat between your hips too and it makes you _want_. 

One of them settles on the edge of the couch next to you and sets you out a nose dive, sneeze sacrament, two tidy little lines of stardust, and then hands you up the straw for them. That’s another motherfucking first, you guess as you bend to partake. They both burn all the way up through your smellstub, like a cloud of hooks tearing out all the cartilage and rushing up rusty and sharp into your panmeat, but you manage not to hardly even flinch and don’t start sniffling ‘til after you’ve handed him back his straw. 

The violet brother set up and lit incense all around and the air is getting heavy with smoke, some deep sharp shit like you’ve never gotten your sniff on to before, but you don’t really feel all much different yet. Mostly you’re thinking about the way the back of your eyeballs is burning as the brother sitting next to you slips you out your robe, his hands big and cool and smooth on your bare shoulders. He strokes you down, shoulders to wrists and then neck to hips. You let it press you back against the couch and sigh a little at how nice his palms feel because your skin is motherfucking burning, your skin is a thin hide stretched tight over a drum full of lit coals, and you’re feeling a little like you might melt through yourself.

He’s jacked tight up into your nasals and your space, up close enough you can smell him through the thick burn of the nose dust, and you’re kind of getting your notice on suddenly to how huge he is. Full-grown adult motherfucker, highblood huge, with shoulders as broad as two of you and thick all the way through, and he’s leaning over and touching you and suddenly you realize you’re basically pinned against the back of the couch. It gives you kind of a start and a growl bubbles up from in your chest all unbidden but not unwelcome.

He doesn’t back off, though. He dips his big head down and kisses you, all sweet and gentle as his fingers rubbing up your belly, but all you can think about is how you don’t even know this brother’s name and how he’s way too fucking close to you. You nip at his tongue and he digs his claws into your hip and keeps on kissing you, other hand coming up to grab onto your chin.

There’s fear growing in you like you’ve never known before, the fear of realizing he could pop your head plumb fucking off and you’re all alone down here with just him and these other big motherfuckers who don’t know you from shit. His tongue’s all thick in your mouth like to choke you and his claws are dragging sideways across your stomach, not hard enough to even hurt but still an obvious threat. If you were wearing pants you’d be like to piss ‘em, if you could move you’d be running, but he’s got you pinned out for him as exposed as you can get.

You don’t know if you make a noise or something, but he pulls back a little to whisper _relax_ all wet against your mouth, and you choke out a laugh. That is patently motherfucking ridiculous. Your whole body is going all kinds of wobbly loose and you can’t even think of trying to get away from him. You try to tell yourself you’re being a stupid wiggler about the whole thing, but you’re still scared and starting to feel a little heartsick.

You just kind of wish Karkat was here, is all, or you were back with him. Because this is holy as all get out and you want it, you do, there is nothing you can think of more satisfying than giving everything you are asked and then everything else you’ve got to give into your messiahs’ service, but you don’t even know this brother’s name, you have never even gotten your observation on to his face before, and he’s running his one of his nails over your nook slit and you wish it had been Karkat to touch you first, maybe. Just a little.

Someone else’s weight settles on the couch on your other side and it sort of startles your eyes half open, which makes you realize they’d drifted closed, and then it’s a motherfucking fight to keep ‘em there as you turn your head. It’s some sister you don’t know, stripped out of her clothes with her hand rubbing up on your knee, pricking her claws delicately over your skin and tugging your legs a little more open. You flop like a puppet at her pulling and he makes satisfied noises at you, low good-boy chest rumbles.

All sudden like you don’t even know why, all your fear starts changing to anger. You’re not yet an adult but you’re not some new fucking wiggler either, and you’re higher than this motherfucker who ain’t even got a lick of paint up on his face, and he’s got no cause to be treating you like this. You growl back at him and he bites on your lip, splitting it open in a burst of coppery cool blood.

Your eyes fall shut all on their own again, and you guess you’re just on look lockdown because you can’t make them get back open again. You guess you don’t really care too much, because the light is still dancing on the insides of your eyelids in patchy purple spots, and anyway you’ve got enough going on senses-wise without them.

Your nose still fucking hurts but you can smell the smoke again, curling up to tickle at the raw remains of your cartilage stub, and you’ve got a noseful of both the trolls all close to you too. You can hear shifting and shuffling and cloth rustling and voices just low enough you can’t be making them out, all around the room around you. Mostly what you’ve got though is a whole lot of feeling, like someone stripped off your skin and every nerve is open and exposed now. You feel like you can feel every soft little thread in the couch underneath you and your skin is holding the memory trails of every finger that slides over it and your lip is burning cool and wet and you’ve got a whole separate fucking miracle of fireworks feeling being set off down between your legs.

Your sister’s scratching little shapes over your thighs that burn so fucking good and your brother’s got his finger deep up in you, hand twisted and stroking up along the top of your insides. Your mind’s pretty fucking fuzzy right now but you try to get your memory on to the anatomy you’ve been schoolfed and if you’re right you think what he’s rubbing up against is your bulge sheath. Ain’t that just fucking something, all these tender parts you’ve got hidden up inside yourself just waiting to get touched?

He strokes you all slow and tender and purposeful and every touch cuts you to the fucking bone, his touch undoes you, his touch razes you, while you squirm and spread yourself wider and wider until you’re sunk halfway down the couch and got your knees hooked so far open it almost hurts. You try not to, just to spite him and because you don’t want to look weak, as stupid as that is with him three times your size and you naked and trapped, but there it is. You can’t really motherfucking help it, though, with the slow teasing way he rubs you.

Your bulge comes coiling out slow as anything, like it’s gonna set its own fucking pace and everyone else can just deal, but it does come coaxed out to say hello. Your sister gets her other fingers on it, unless that’s someone else, you honestly do not know or have it in you to care, and you kind of forget to breathe for a second because fucking _oh_.

They play you both between them until you’re stretched ready about to snap, quivering and too tense, and then suddenly they both let go and you think you really know what torture is, now. Before you can get to make any rowdy noises about it though, his big ol’ hands are up around your waist and lifting you into his lap. 

You are limp, you are a puppet in his hands, you are a string-cut fuck marionnette to be placed however he likes, which is with your thighs wrapped all around his hips and your face smushed all into his chest. You try to get your teeth in him and he just laughs and that makes you mad as a fucking hornet in a jar.

His bulge comes sliding wet up the inside of one leg and wraps itself up in yours for just a second, squeezing, and then the tip of it nudges lower to your slit. He gets his hands on your hips all tight when it starts coiling up into you, maybe to hold you up because your legs are flat having nothing to do with that noise right now.

Or maybe it’s to hold you still, because once it gets much past the tip it’s as fucking huge as the rest of him and it _hurts_. You’re split on it, you are torn, you are pressed a-fucking-sunder and it burns almost through the haze in your head. You make to jerk away but he’s got you right in place and all you really do is shudder and then whine, and then whimper, and then let out a soft wet sob against his chest as he just keeps pressing and keeps pressing. His finger got you so wet it was dripping down underneath you and it’s smeared all down your legs right now, but you’ve still never had a single solitary thing bigger than that inside you and your muscles keep trying to lock against the intrusion like that’ll fucking help anything.

It hits you real sudden that you hate him. He coos to you and rubs one hand down your back and says, all concerned like, “Maybe you’re too little. Maybe you’re not ready to take it.”

Privately you think it’s plain not gonna fucking fit until you’re big enough your hips are wider than his fucking hand, but you clench your teeth shut hard on that and the pathetic hurt wiggler noise that wants to come out because of how it keeps pushing. Instead you dredge a snarl up out your throat at him.

“Motherfucking ready,” you pant out, voice all thin with the pain and slow with the smoke wafting around in your pan. Just to show him, you push yourself down a little, dragging your claws all down his side when you think it’s probably going to tear you wide fucking open.

“You’re just a little thing,” he says. His voice is all syrupry fake sweetness all in counterpoint to the relentless way his bulge is forcing its way into you and the way his claws dig into your hips. “Just a little half-grown wiggler. I don’t think a wiggler’s worthy of taking this.”

He lets you move when it’s towards him, hips straining down against the cruel push of his bulge, and it’s a small fucking mercy what you’ve got your face in his chest and he probably can’t tell the pain tears pricking at your eyes from the heat sweat all over you. It’s agony and a half over again, but you are most motherfucking worthy and you won’t let his noise tell you otherwise.

It feels like it takes an eternity, but through some miracle you don’t tear right in half but just stretch, slow and burning, until his bulge is buried all pulsing and squirmy inside of you. You’re feeling pretty light-headed and it helps, you think, because it doesn’t take near as long as you think it should before the way it writhes against your inner parts just feels so fucking good. You try to move but he’s still got you and he holds you, cupping you by the ass to pull you closer in against him but not letting you do much else.

You never got your understanding on for black feelings, to tell the truth, because you basically like every motherfucker you’ve ever met, but you think you’re getting it now. He’s got you under his control and he won’t let you forget it, holding you all teasing still while his bulge squirms inside you until you think it might just drive you plain crazy unless you can move, and then he keeps you a little longer, and a little more than that, until you realize he isn’t intending on letting you move at all.

You come aware that someone is making all these high chirrupy need noises and you realize it’s you, and kind of turn that marvel over a couple of times, that your body’s all telling everyone how good it feels before your mind even catches up the pain is over with. It still aches like fuck but in a good way, and when his bulge gives a hard rippling twist the ache flares up from embers to fire and you spasm with it, clenching down bruisingly hard around him.

He gets out some rumbling groan sounds at that and you try to make yourself do it again, squeezing on purpose as hard as you can. With your body all as lax as it is it’s not much, but his bulge jerks like it likes it and he doesn’t try to make you stop so you keep doing it. You can’t for too long because of how the muscles up in you get all tired, you guess probably from never being even fucking used, and that’s a marvel too, because damn, how do they even know to do that shit in the first place? You still make yourself do it until they burn.

Everything starts to hit you really hard right around then and you kind of start to lose the thread of what’s happening. Your pump is galloping in your chest and your pulse is pounding in your bulge and nook and up behind your eyes, rushing in your ears, and your head feels helium-filled and cotton-stuffed and like it might just fly right the fuck off, and in the meantime all the things you smell and hear and feel are going dreamy and weird-shaped. You fall backwards through your own skull and watch yourself arching on his bulge, your whole body one long hot line of furious pleasure strung up along him.

You’re snapped a little back by the sudden gush of fluid into you, his bulge shaking against your walls as he comes. His spill fills you up until you feel like a balloon again, tethered by the thin string of nothing but this new sensation, a blooming wet heat tucked up sort of against your left hipbone. Distantly you hear a metal clatter and then he pulls out of you, leaving you empty and aching, while something hard and cold shoves up between your thighs. You think you sob out that you hate him for leaving you like this but you aren’t sure, you can’t really hear anything clear.

Your eyes sort of tilt open and you stare stupidly down at the bucket you’re kneeling over before you realize that’s what it is. Your face heats up all the way to the tips of your ears and that strikes you as about the best fucking joke you’ve heard in a while, that you’re getting fucked raw in a room full of strangers and you’re blushing at a motherfucking bucket. You start laughing and somewhere halfway through it turns into a jagged kind of moaning because the way you move makes that wet heat shift inside you and pleasure spark out from it, til you’re all tight and close with it and then your whole body shudders so hard everything goes blank and white for a second.

When you come back your legs are wet and you’re quaking down to your bones. You sag against him and someone takes the bucket and then he rolls you over all deftlike against your sister, who gets her hands wandering pretty swift like all over your anatomy. 

She doesn’t waste much time getting her bulge up inside you either, quick to the point is this sister of yours. Either she’s smaller than him or you’re just all stretched proper from him now, but it doesn’t hurt at all this time and she lets you move. She gets you face down and ass up with the rim of a fresh pail digging into your stomach, which you rut against like you were hatched without a shame cortex, which sometimes you think is maybe true.

Her touch is all soft and gentle, fingers stroking over where he scratched your legs and hips and lips brushing your back. She rocks slow up into you and touches you all nice, and you don’t even get mad when you hear yourself chirping for her.

Your signal’s bad, your signal’s bust, you fade in and out with her until you stay mostly out. This time you don’t even come back in when you come but just roll on with it almost like it’s some other motherfucker spilling those blended colors out into the bucket. You’re all floating up above this body business on a wave of about the best feelings you’ve ever felt, almost serene-like inside all the chaos of needing and wanting and fucking.

The rest all take their turns with you too, and you lose count of how many there really are. It feels like a hundred thousand hands on you and a hundred thousand mouths kissing you and a hundred thousand different bulges twining up inside you, like a whole stadium crowd bending and twisting you to fuck you all their own way. You don’t know that you ever get back to the first two and you can only barely even tell when someone else is taking their turn, only barely feel the fill and spill before you’re being pailed all over again. It all just feels so good, like coming the whole time, so you can barely even tell when you really do.

Eventually you are done and wrung dry, your last offering to the pail a paltry-ass thing, a trickle, a broken faucet dribble. You hardly have anything left to mix with your brother’s blue to make its hue less rude. After that you get propped up on the couch and some motherfucker wipes all the rainbow spill off your legs and then you get tucked back into your robe. Someone takes you out of the room, mostly carrying you with how weak your legs are, and the cooler air outside hits you like a slap to the face. You huddle up underneath your blankets as soon as you get back to your room and fall almost straight asleep, spinning down and down through the bed and floor and into fractured and uneasy dreams where there are hands grabbing at you and mouths on you and you can’t see or hear anyone.

You half-surface from sleep a few times and mostly dive right back under before you even realize it. Once you come awake enough to realize you’re half sober again and sore as fuck, and then you’re sinking and that knowing dissolves right out your pan.

You’re still a little loopy when you get roused up again the next day, everything all soft and tilting muted around you as you pull the robe around yourself and are led back down that corridor. You half doze and half plain zone the fuck out while you wait, and you guess you must’ve been up and tired enough that you did nod off a bit because you jerk back into reality when someone gets their cold hands up on you.

It goes all about the same as last time did, except this time the violet brother sets you out your lines of snort powder and then takes the first turn with you. He’s rough, biting at your mouth and dragging his claws all down your arms and chest, growling when you squirm and scratching deeper when you bite back. He gets a hand between your legs and then his fingers up in you and he scratches you there, too, raking your insides bloody, laughing while you thrash. 

It hurts like nothing you’ve ever felt before in your life, worse than the other brother the other day who split you open on his bulge, but you bite in your own cries because you are motherfucking worthy for this and you’re not going to let them say you’re not. The messiahs take their fealty in pain and pounds of flesh and you will give to them this all as glad as you please if it means you can serve them like you were hatched to.

When he gets all up in you you’re blood-tacky and it doesn’t slide half as good as yesterday, but he doesn’t seem to mind none so you get on like you don’t either, baring your teeth in his stupid finfuck face and hissing mad with every coil and thrust. He just keeps fucking laughing at you, hands fluttering like the grossest parody of gentle up your sides, and when he comes in you it motherfucking burns.

The next brother gets his hands on you red-soft and pity-slow and kisses on your mouth like you’re the sweetest elixir he ever did get a taste of. He pulls you up in his lap and strokes every part of you and gets you whimpering and wet and shuddering against him before he finally pails you, and at some point during that you drift off on the smoke again, up above and somewhere deep inside yourself.

It goes on like that for you don’t even know how long, all the days blending up into each other and blowing away like dust on the wind. You wake up and get passed around and pailed dry and then go sleep for a day and then get back up again, every day passing sleep bleary and delirious like the longest fever dream you ever did have part of. Time feels like the thin oil rainbow skin of a bubble, stretching until it’s about ready to pop, and you’re all tumbling around inside it looking out at everything shiny and distorted.

You can feel it when you start winding down, the overwhelming frantic chorus beat of _need_ in your pan and gut and bulge all slowly dying down, until it’s mostly a bunch of nothing. The last couple of days, not even the drugs can make you feel less listless and the pitch you wax at the motherfuckers who get rough with you is less pitch and more waxy.

You expect to get some extra sleep allowance when you’re finished up, but you don’t think it’s much more than the normal day they always give you before you’re getting woke up again. This time you get to dress in your clothes, and your embellished sister guides you up and back out into the areas of the church you’re more familiar with.

You’re plodding all along behind her like a packbeast with your head drooping so your horns are like to stab her in the ass if she stops suddenly, so you don’t even notice you’re being taken back up to the mediliquidator’s office until you’re in it.

She helps strip you down because you’re mostly useless in the limbs department and also in the doing any goddamn thing department, and you sit reeling on the metal table wondering if you’ll pass out before he comes in. You’re not even sure if it’s the same motherfucker as before or even if that really happened, or if maybe you’re confusing him with someone else who you just met, but you still get all kinds of discomfort squirming going on in your belly when he gets you laid back and spead-legged for him.

This time he gets two fingers right up inside you and feels around, none of that ginger pressing shit like he did last time where you barely even felt it, but really getting his exploration on to your most personal parts. He strokes you like he wants to count the ridges in your bulge sheath and doesn’t go easy when you hiss and shift as his gloved fingers slide over scabbing claw scrapes, neither. You don’t know what anyone who just pailed you for two weeks straight ever got this thoroughly up close and personal with all your junk and you’d be a little mad, but you’re mostly just tired and sick to fucking death of being touched. You get all kinds of discontent but mostly just make unhappy noises instead of doing anything about it.

You sort of drift off after he’s done and no one tells you to sit up again, because fuck you and all your brothers and sisters but you are one exhausted motherfucker. You hear him and your sister talking over you, _some fluids into him_ this and _ever do it without ripping the poor things in half_ that and some half-salty mmhms from your sister who don’t seem to be liking the noise he makes much.

She gets you up again and gets you back dressed again and takes you back up to your room. You spare a thought for, damn, how does she even know where your room is? and then you just haul yourself up fucking in it and you are glad to be home, more than you think your pump can handle.

Your room smells like sleep-smoke and Karkat and all this tension you didn’t even realize you was carrying melts the fuck off you like water off a quackbeast. You barely manage to stumble out of your clothes before you go flopping right down in a ball on your bed, back wedged up against the wall and arms all crossed over yourself and eyes peering half open across the room at your most favorite brother of all.

You’re just about drifting off with your brother in your smellstub and the veins in your eyelids when his warm shape burrows all the fuck up between your arms, shaggy nubby head pressing up into your chin.

“Where have you fucking been?” he snaps, voice all tight with worry and fear. You mumble out a shoosh and pap at his shoulder.

“Tell you later.” You’re half-asleep and falling deeper into it fast. You think you could sleep for a whole fucking perigee and still be tired.

He grumps some at that but stays where he is and gets all quiet and lets you sleep, which you do easier than you have in a while with his smell curling around you and his rusty angry little bee buzz of a purr rumbling against you.


	3. Chapter 3

When you wake up again you feel like someone put a little man with hammers up inside your head and told him to break your pan open. You roll over and let out a miserable groan and you are fairly convinced within your heart and soul that you’re dying.

Karkat puts a glass of water in your hand. “Drink that. Some chucklefuck came by earlier and told me not to let you die of being a moron who doesn’t drink.”

That water is straight up, no fronting, the sweetest elixir you have ever tasted you in your life. You drink it all straight down so fast it drives this big cold spike all through your brains and then you do the same thing with the next one he gives you and then you kind of fall back and groan again, _aaauuagh_ , because suddenly your belly’s all bloated and sloshing and you think you might be sick.

You don’t even have to look at Karkat to know he’s rolling his eyes practically out his face.

“So,” he says all prim and businesslike after you’ve stopped making pukey faces. “You said you’d tell me later and it has now been two and a half days since your reeking carcass got hauled back in here. Where were you?”

You start about to say you don’t reek of nothing, but then you realize that probably you did and still do smell like sex and about five other trolls, so that statement’s gonna hold water like a net. You wonder real brief in one corner of your pan if you shouldn’t be telling Karkat, since your punchline-blooded motherfucker is about as far from a subjugglator potential as anyone can even be, but it’s Karkat and you love him and you’d tell him any single thing he asked.

You prop yourself up a little and try to get it straight in your headspace, which still has some squidgy bits from being high for about two weeks straight. “Okay, so, turns out I was all up in motherfucking heat. I know, right, like damn, how does that even know to happen? Motherfucking miracles, man, we’re fucking made of ‘em.” He does not look particularly impressed by these anatomical miracles, but you’re basically used to that and figure he must be on the inside, because they are straight up miraculous. “And it turns out that if you’re being all purple up like what am I being, then when you get up in heat you go get some knowledge dropped in your aurals about the wicked family and how you get up to joining that shit.”

Karkat makes an impatient twirling motion with one finger. “You’re not preaching to me, get to the point already.”

You just smile all fond at him because every time you get your expounding on about a miracle or new piece of knowing it’s a preaching moment, no matter what, and one day maybe he’ll learn that the whole world is his own personal sermon, but you don’t say it. “There’s all kinds of shit they’re gonna be up and doing, but first of all you gotta go make your due contribution to the slurry.”

He’s gone a really interesting shade of pink under his cheeks. “Do you mean you were off getting p-pailed?”

“That’s about the shape of it,” you tell him. “‘Cause you know the priests are being celibate motherfuckers, right, so you gotta make sure you contribute before that happens so as our caste doesn’t just up and fucking get ceased to be existing, you dig?”

He’s still blushing and now his mouth is kind of turning down the way it does when he is thinking over something and realizing he really doesn’t like it. You frown a little at that too and reach out to try and press a corner of it up. His lips are so soft against your fingers and lowblood hot, and you think about that time so long ago when he kissed you.

Suddenly, you wish that it had been him who’d pailed you first. He wasn’t even in season with you, couldn’t have done it anyway, and anyway it would be a motherfucking heresy to be doing a thing like that, spilling out your color into his mutant slop, but you wish you’d done it. You bet he would’ve been sweet as anything and blushed the whole way through and probably said fuck a whole lot and blustered when he didn’t know what the fuck even was he doing, and his hands would’ve been so _warm_. You want to laugh a little at that but it comes out like this shaky-ass sigh and you feel this sadness squeezing your pump for just a second.

“Yeah, everyone knows that. So you’re not gonna do it again?” Which means, _you’re not gonna disappear on me again?_ His eyes are big and bright with worry.

“No, you only do it once.” And you’re pretty solid convinced that even if you up and could, you wouldn’t ever want to do it again. You’re wondering how any motherfucker stands doing it every sweep, but you guess maybe it’s easier if you’re with someone you’ve got those kinds of feelings in your pump for, anyway.

“That’s good to know. So what ridiculous fuckery is next?”

“Can’t tell you,” you say, because you can’t and even though you plan to as soon as you get it done, you’re gonna pretend like you’re keeping it under wraps for now. Give him a little taste of mystery. “Secret shit, brother, you know. I don’t know when they’ll be taking me to up and do it next, though, but don’t get your fret on if I up and all disappear again, okay?”

He huffs and frowns and beetles his eyebrows in together all angry like, but he agrees anyway. “I don’t see why they have to make such a stupid production out of the whole thing.”

“It’s a motherfucking performance, brother, how can they not? Ain’t no mirth or whimsy in some boring-ass shit you tell up to every motherfucker what points his sponges towards it.” You stroke the pouting bow of his mouth with your thumb and grin to see him go all wobbly with surprise. “Shush up now.” 

You pull him in a little and lean up a little and kiss again, this time all soft and dry and slow. You don’t taste each other none, just press your lips together, and then you lay back down and curl yourself in against his chest. 

After another day you have to go back to your regular schoolfeeding. Some others throw some weird looks your way but no one really says anything, and you guess your teachers must all know what’s up because none of them says a word. Karkat gets put in charge of telling you what all you up and missed so you don’t fall too far behind, which he does as sour as squeezed citrusfruit.

No one says boo to you for near a whole perigee, enough time for all your scrapes and scratches to heal and you to barely even remember walking funny, and you to put back on the weight you lost besides. You’re all conflict and qualm up inside yourself about it because you like the break, and like feeling like shit is normal, and definitely like being as close as you can get to Karkat, but you want to know what’s happening next. There’s this little squeakbeast stupid part of you that wonders if you really are unworthy, if maybe somehow you didn’t do good enough.

Then, when it’s just been long enough you’re starting to get real worriment going up inside yourself, you get a visit from a brother who you think you’ve seen around. He inquires all polite after your health and how your schoolfeeding is going and then makes it known you’re coming with him, which you up and do with all the speed you can muster.

You can’t lie that you aren’t getting a little tired of being taken places by motherfuckers you don’t really know, but you figure it all basically counts as good shit so you’ll let that one slide. Besides, a little mystery never up and hurt nobody.

He takes you at least to somewhere you actually get your recognition on to, which is one of the purification rooms. You’ve been in them before, for when you first got your white base coat and then after you completed your face, and you know basically what’s going to happen. You get given the sacred ablutions, stripped and washed and rubbed down, all with plain soap and cold water that leaves you curling in all small and shivery on yourself. It’s the barest kind of cleaning, all your dirt and grime and even your face washed clean off, until you’re practically nothing.

Then you get on a robe, still black but much heavier than the other one you wore just recently, and are ushered into the little prayer room off the ablutions chamber. 

Your priest up and schoolfeeds you again, and this is shit you did not have any knowing of. It’s the ritual. It’s your induction and your first sacrament of the holy suffering. He tells you in words all heavy and measured and slow that drop like stones inside your pan, of what they will do to you, of what pound of flesh they will take, of how they will carve the loyalty out of your unworthy motherfucking body and make you into someone close to even halfway fit to serve the mirthful messiahs.

You are grave with the knowing of this thing. You are heavy with it. It sits like iron in the center of your pan and you try to wrap yourself around it. You shiver with it and he sees you but does not comment, lets you run through your own cowardice, and only when you give assent to having it done on you does he react.

He smiles, all proud, and your pump swells with it.

Then it’s again with being walked somewhere else, the priest all up and behind you with a hand between your shoulderblades, and if you maybe lean a little back into his touch because you’ve got some fear lingering up in you, he doesn’t say a peep of it.

This new room is a surgical story, all empty sterile white like the most left desolate of places, all gleaming steel and porcelain like to almost hurt your eyes. It’s softened only somewhat by the tapestries up on the wall, the kind of delicate bloodwefts that take sweeps to make, and the thin curl of sweet incense through the air. It’s a quiet kind of smell, like mist rolling in.

Right in the center of the room is a big reclining chair done up in old smooth leather. The priest takes your robe and helps you get up in it and then just stands there at you side. There’s feet stirrups but he doesn’t make you get your feet in them yet, lets you keep your ankles twisting all nervously together. He’ll stay to bear witness, he says, and puts a big hand all soothing on your shoulder and tells you to relax, not to worry yourself up about it.

The troll who comes in to do it surprises you. She’s barely blue enough to not be green and old, hair all streaked with grey and horns pale at the tips. She’s not hunched or nothing, though, and there’s no hint of falter or weakness in her stance nor shake in her hands as she goes about setting what she needs out on the tray next to you. 

You try not to look none at that because everything on there scares you and you’re getting yourself whipped up into a proper panic even without it. A scared little whimpery noise escapes you when she nudges at your legs to get them apart and your feet in those stirrups. She chuckles and pats the inside of your knee, hand rude-hued warm against you, and you feel a little more at ease, although you’re sure the look you’re giving her is like a cornered hopbeast.

She explains to you in this real easy, slow voice what she’s gonna do, walks you through the steps before she does ‘em and tells you why. First off she gets these wide leather cuffs you didn’t even get your notice on around your wrists and ankles, to keep you from squirming around too much at a bad time, she says.

Then she wipes your thighs and then your crotch down with something soft and cool. She gets you real thorough, all around your seedflap and then poking in under it to get the delicate outsides of your nookslit too. It tingles and burns all wet and cold against your skin, making you shift around a little, but it doesn’t last for long enough to get unpleasant. That’s to make sure you’re all clean, she says, just like how she’s gonna go wash off her hands and scrub up under her claws - all trimmed short and rounded off so she couldn’t hardly hurt a fly with ‘em - and then douse ‘em in alcohol too.

You’re feeling more cold and uncomfortable than scared now, mostly, and you only barely even jump when she goes for something on the tray and then it starts pushing up inside you. It’s thin and long and plasticky, maybe, and while it doesn’t really hurt, it feels all kinds of motherfucking odd. 

She does some fiddling to it and it starts to bloom open, stretching you out, which gets a lot more close to hurting but never quite pushes over that line. Apparently it’s being some kind of speculum, and for getting you open so she can see what she’s doing. She says she wouldn’t want to be operating on you blind and she figures you wouldn’t either, with that low laugh again.

It goes real slow so it doesn’t hurt, just aches and almost burns and is as uncomfortable as fuck, until she’s got you wide enough to suit her purposes and then gets a couple fingers up inside you to do some feeling around all thorough like.

She rubs her fingers all around the underside of your bulge sheath, up and down its whole length and then slowly across the width of it, pressing until she finds where your sheath stops and the walls of your nook begin. It starts off feeling weird and gets to good pretty quickly. Your bulge comes slithering out to say hello, coiling against its own self in the open air. Mostly you try to pretend it’s not, because this isn’t supposed to be sexy and it’s kind of embarrassing that it’s waving itself around practically right in her face.

She makes a satisfied kind of noise and slides one finger all careful like in between the edge of your bulge and the sheath, which, okay, feels about as fucking weird as anything you’ve ever felt before. It’s like getting an eyelash stuck in your eye, just on the edge of painful and irritating and _wrong_ , like something being where it just plain should fucking not be. The longer her finger stays in there, too, the worse it gets.

She’s not in any hurry to get it out, though, leaning over all calm to pick up something that rings faintly metal against the tray.

“First,” she says, in a level schoolfeeding voice, “we remove the bulge sheath. This will hurt, but try to stay relaxed.”

You don’t get much time to even tense up, though, before she’s already doing it. What she’s got is a motherfucking scalpel and she gets the blade of it up right beside her finger on your sheath, slicing through the thin membrane smooth as butter, and you’re so dumb with the shock of it you don’t even feel the pain until she’s halfway down your nook.

It knocks right the fuck through you when it hits, though, punches your lungs straight out your back and crushes your throat closed so all the noise you can make is this thin, high little thready scream. It just goes on and on til you can’t hardly even believe it’s you making that noise.

She don’t pay you a single shred of mind though, just keeps on carving as neat and slow as you please, like you aren’t even making a dying animal racket at her. The pain eats its way up through your throat and the roof of your mouth and gets in your pan so you can’t hardly even know what’s happening, just that it hurts and you hate it and you’d do about anything you could to make it stop. You think maybe you’re trying to ask for it to, all under your breath, but all that comes out is that tea kettle shriek.

The pain doesn’t stop when she’s done, but it abates some, and you become aware that your body was stretched in a tight agonized arc when it slumps back all boneless against the chair. Numbly you watch her pull your sheath out and drop it up in this little metal bowl on the tray, and you get your marvel on some about how such a little scrap of flesh gave you so much hurt.

You are set alight between your legs, you’re burning up into your guts, you’re hurting still so bad you can’t hardly even be ashamed at how little it took to get you screaming. You want to beg for her to stop. It’s worse than you ever could have conjured it in your imagination to be. You’re a coward again, you’re a fucking wiggler, you’ll be whatever names anyone wants to give you if she just never makes you hurt even half as much as that ever again.

You bite all that back and watch to see what she does next, trying to stop your panicky fear gasping.

“Our next step is to excise the bulge,” she says, voice all steady and level and reasonable like she isn’t talking about taking that wicked little blade to your most sensitive bits. “Hold as still as you can, please, it would be _unfortunate_ if I slipped.”

You grip at the cuff chains hard enough to make your knuckles go nearly white and lean your head back, shut your eyes, and try to think of anything that isn’t what she’s about to do. You wish she’d do it quicker, so you had less time to think about it, but she don’t seem in any mood to hurry up.

Your bulge has tucked itself right the fuck back up inside you. She gets it pinched between her thumb and forefinger and pulls it out straight as far as it’ll go, then a little more so it’s stretched tight. A helpless whine curls up out your throat all unbidden when the scalpel gets back in you, tapping its slow way up to the base of your bulge.

She does it as fucking slow as she can, cutting you in careful little half circle slices and pulling on the end of your bulge to peel it away bit by bit. You feel like nothing but a sack of dumb twitching meat, nothing but raw nerves and pain like lightning in your skull. You’re sick with it, you shake with it, you are all aquiver and quavering and you can’t even keep your voice up through it, so bad it hurts. You sob soundlessly and jerk at your cuffs and shake until you think you might come apart.

You start to grey out near the end of it, everything going all fuzzy and distant and wobbly distorted, feeling like you’re tilting even though you know you’re lying flat. You honest to god think you might puke from the pain and that’s not any kind of helping. She gets done before it gets too bad, though, before you throw up or pass out proper. This time you don’t watch, don’t think you can, but you feel the tug as the last little slivers of skin holding your bulge in place give way and hear the sick wet plop as she drops it into her collection bowl. 

You come aware of yourself sobbing, big stuttering gusts of hurt noise on every whistly breath you gasp in. Everything between your knees and hips burns like it was flayed open and salted. Your mind feels fuzzy as it did when you were drugged, bleary and stupid slow and too distant to really pick up on anything. You’re about the most miserable bitch you think you’ve ever known of.

You think maybe she’s done, but then she’s talking again and you don’t quite catch it, your ears ringing with your screams and your panmeat fizzling unresponsive. Doesn’t much matter though. All it means is she’s going to hurt you more.

She puts the scalpel down, at least, and you start to breathe a little easier at that except whatever she picks up is even worse. She touches just the tip of it to one of the burning lines of pain where she cut away your sheath and it sears you, it shoots lightning up your spine and sets your head on fire and your whole body to spasmodic shuddering. She traces all along the path of where she cut you with it, full up to the brim with methodic care. You come woeful to the realization that you were dead motherfucking wrong when you thought nothing could hurt as much as that scalpel, because this is like if she’d rubbed it in salt and then edged it with glass, maybe, like digging hot grit into the neat surgical slices done through you.

She pulls the speculum out of you by slow degrees, so you mostly get used to how much it hurts when the walls of your nook touch each other again, and then goes to tidy up all her equipment. You loll back and listen to water in the sink run, while the priest who came to witness rubs on your shoulder like that’ll even fucking help. You guess maybe it does give you something to ground you, a point to focus on that doesn’t hurt. Mostly you focus on not passing the fuck out.

Suddenly something’s touching you down there again and you make this low little sobbing sound because you’re not sure how much more you can even take right now, but it isn’t any kind of hurting. She rubs you careful clean of all the blood drying on you with a soft wet cloth, talking at you again in that teacher voice.

“You’ll be coming back in for another session once this has all healed up a little more, in a couple of weeks.” With that she unbuckles the cuffs and steps away.

You slide out of it boneless and scared to even move. It’s not so bad at first, just standing up on your feet, doesn’t hurt much more than laying back did. Then you try to take a step and you realize your body is all kinds of harsh at you right now and screaming it as loud as it can. The priest gets you by the shoulders and holds you up a little. You make it to the door and then list against the frame of it like you’re drunk, and lean down and get sick all over the floor.

It just hurts so fucking _bad_ , ceaseless dizzy throbbing pain all up and down every inch of yourself. You are saturated with it and it’s sending you wobbling all off every kind of balance, physical and mental, til you can’t hardly think any better than you can walk.

You start to make some apologetic noises, but she just laughs and says you’re not the first person to lose their lunch and you probably won’t be the last.

Somehow you manage to hobble your way back up to your room, where you collapse on your bed _very carefully_ and then lay doing your best imitation of a board, on your back and legs stretched out flat. Squeezed too close feels like pushing on a bruise, but something inside you pulls unpleasantly when you try to stretch them too far apart either. You guess maybe she cauterized the cuts shut or something, because you haven’t bled much more and you were doing it like a stuck fucking pig right up until she put that burning thing on you.

Karkat’s off in schoolfeeding, you guess, so he’s not there to fuss over you none. You can’t tell if you’re disappointed or not. You know he’ll ask what happened and you know you’ll tell him, even though technically it’s not allowed, because he’s Karkat and even though you’re sick with pain and tired as motherfuck, you’re also all kinds of delirious happy about this shit.

You bet no one would even get that salty about telling him. You tell him everything. You two haven’t made any official troth yet, because you can’t do that until you’re eight sweeps, but you’ve both been stupid pale for each other since only about for fucking ever and you think everyone else knows it too. As soon as his eighth wiggling day, you’re gonna both go and get yourselves scarred up so to show who you’re righteously belonging to.

You drift off with soft thoughts of being official moirails and how much he’d probably get his enjoyment on to know you’re thinking romantic shit like that.


	4. Chapter 4

You wake up with him sitting next to you and glaring down, the way he does when he’s really worried but doesn’t want to say it. You manage a sleepy half-smile back and reach up to touch his face, rub your fingertips over all those wrinkles in his brow.

“What in the name of your retarded bullshit clown gods happened _now_?” He sounds real worried too, all threading through his voice til it’s squeaky high with concern. “Are you hurt?”

You bark a short little laugh then. “That does not even begin to fucking cover it, my brother.” You pat at the angry slash of his mouth. “Don’t get your worry on, though, I’ll be okay. It’s all shit that’s up and supposed to happen, don’t give it no mind.”

“It’s a little hard not to give it any mind when you smell like a fucking slaughterhouse. What happened?” He shifts down to lay next to you, curling into the grumpiest little ball against your chest. You pet at his fluffy hair and kind of forget what you were supposed to be talking about for a minute, until he elbows you. “What did they do to you now?”

The pain is doing its sicknasty throbbing all up through your business even when you stay perfectly still. It almost feels like your pulse. “Aw brother, don’t talk about it like that. They didn’t up and do nothing to me, except for start to invite me into the motherfucking fold of the holy.”

“Okay, that’s great, but what did they _do_?”

You mull over how to even up and speak that noise, and decide to just go with the basics, since you figure Karkat probably doesn’t much have an understanding of the theological reasoning behind it and isn’t interested in hearing it, as much as you’d like to tell him. “They up and cut a motherfucker’s bulge out, is basically it.”

He goes an awful kind of still and rigid against you, pulling this concerned little squeak noise out your throat. “They _what_?” You have never heard him so filled with incredulity. He brims with it.

“Just sliced it right the fuck up out, pretty much.” You give an experimental little shift of your hips and bite back a hiss at how much more it makes it hurt. “Feels fucking weird without it, man, like, you don’t even notice you can feel that shit until it’s gone and then you’re like, damn, what the fuck even happened, where’d it go? Feels all empty.” Although not as much as you’re sure it will later, when the pain abates and stops filling up that empty space with hot swelling.

He pushes himself away from your chest and back up to sitting and you are almost sorry to behold him, because he is fucking wroth. You get the realization on that you’ve never actually seen him mad, that even his worst rage is tetchy compared to this, and for a second you feel so fucking small, having it pointed at you.

“They - they - how can you just sit there and talk about that like it’s nothing?” There’s this odd tight note in his voice you realize is nearly a sob. “That’s the most gobsmackingly horrific goddamn thing I’ve ever heard, Gamzee! Oh my fuck, they...” He pats at you, all random like, your cheeks and shoulders and chest, like maybe he wants to try to lay soothing hands on where you’re hurt but knows he can’t, or maybe like he just wants to soothe everything out of you. “Sweet nookgnawing Christ, I can’t.”

You sit yourself up even though wow, you really don’t want to, you’d rather be in about any other position than that, and pull his face in close. You knock foreheads. “Shoosh bro, come on, what’re you getting salty about? They do it to motherfucking everyone.” He smells teary and it just tears you to pieces inside.

“What am I - _Gamzee_ , I know you are not actually half as appallingly stupid as you like everyone to think you are. You really don’t see what could possibly be a _little upsetting_ about hearing that they _mutilated_ you?”

You give him the longest shoosh whistle you can muster up, reaching up to rub your thumb over the tip of one nubby little horn. “Aw, brother, no, it’s not being like that. You’ve got this all twisted around in your pan to be a bad motherfucking thing, but sure as shit it ain’t.” With your hand on his horn he goes mostly quiet, not purring or anything happy, but quiet enough to let you put words to your thoughts. “It’s like, fuck, I don’t know if you’re gonna get it, because I know you’re not religious, but it’s like... Suffering and feeling up in pain is all about what is life even being about, my brother, it’s the holy truth of fucking existing. They put the hurting on me to show me the path I gotta take, the way to get to enlightenment and serve my most holy mirthful motherfucking messiahs. And they take from you too as like a, a symbolic motherfucking thing, like to show you’re giving shit up, you’re sacrificing. It makes your pain fealty physical. You get what I’m laying down?”

Your brother’s quiet for a good long time and then gusts out a sigh. “No. Not really. I think it’s fucking stupid and and you’re completely crazy. But I guess kicking up a fuss isn’t going to change anything, and it’s not like you can sew the fucking thing back on.”

That’s maybe not really the ideal response you wanted, but you’ve been steadily coming to being at peace with the fact that your best brother can’t share in your spiritual feelings. Sometimes you ache for all the ecstasy he can’t ever come to feel, but mostly it’s okay. Motherfuckers are all being different and even if he doesn’t believe in the messiahs, you know he’s got a ticket up to the dark motherfucking carnival anyway. You’ve long since decided to make fucking sure that that particular miracle is true.

You smile anyway, and tilt your head to kiss him. “Yeah, pretty much.”

He lets you both slide back down to laying. “So is that it? Are you done getting mutilated by crazy people?”

“Nah, I got some more to do yet.” You kiss him again just to keep him from squawking whatever noise he had in mind at that. “It’s not so much more. I’ll tell you about it.” Show him, too, once you get to the last bits, which you’re almost more excited about because it’ll be something to show other than just the hurt and emptiness.

By the time two weeks is past you’re still not used to the empty sensation of something _missing_ nor the pull of the scars, but it doesn’t hurt much anymore. Mostly it just fucking itches like to kill you, and you can’t hardly even scratch most of the time because it still hurts to touch. Karkat gets some lectures and nasty looks to you when you do give in and scratch, half because he says you’re going to give yourself an infection or something and probably half because it involves sticking your hand all down the front of your pants, but you have trouble finding a fuck in you to give.

Your gut’s all churning with apprehension when you get taken back down again. You’re glad you got told to fast the day before, or you might’ve gotten sick again during the ablutions, and probably definitely when you stepped back up in that room.

In a weird way, though, you feel less scared of it, because now you know about the shape of what you’re in for when you settle yourself into that chair. You guess it is like that old saying about the evil you know.

She spreads the speculum out wider than before and then gets up in you with her fingers, pressing up inside you and then on your stomach with your other hand. Apparently that’s to find the bit of your innards that makes your genetic material, which she says needs to get taken out. Which you guess means more of the scalpel and aren’t really too excited about, to tell the honest motherfucking truth, but you just kind of nod and try not to squirm too much when she gets that ticklish spot by your right hip.

Once she’s found it she does get the scalpel up ins. You just grit your teeth and try not to jerk every time a cold metal edge bumps against your walls, and wait for the hurting to start. It’s probably not as bad as cutting into your bulge, but that’s already mostly a memory and this is right here and now, the blade parting your delicate skin under it like it isn’t even a thing to be doing that to a motherfucker.

You don’t scream none this time, at least, just whine and go all stiff. The worst isn’t actually the cutting, even, but when she’s done with that and then has like four fingers and what feels like a pair of tweezers inside you, pulling on something that tugs unpleasantly up in your guts and tapping the scalpel blade on little connective bits that are so thin you hardly feel them sever. It just keeps going on, tugging and glancing little split second pains and a deep sense of invasion, fingers and instruments where nothing should ever be touching, and then finally it pulls loose and she gets everything back out.

It’s motherfucking tiny, the thing she drops in her bowl, just a little lump maybe caeger sized and all dripping with purple. You kind of marvel a little at how that was tucked all safe up inside of you until just a second ago, and how it’s apparently what made all those bucketsful back when you were in season, and now it’s this little lump chilling in your medisister’s steel bowl.

You actually yell when she touches the cauterizer to you, thoughts all derailed and mind panicking for a second because you just flat were not even expecting it, and then keep up a steady whimper while she gets the new hole she made in you real thorough. It can’t have been that big, but it sure feels like it when she’s burning it shut.

All her instruments get pulled out of you and then she sits back on her little stool and gives you some time to come down from that, just watching until your breathing’s back to mostly normal. “I find this next part is usually the hardest,” she says, which is not a pronouncement like to fill you with any measure of joy. “Sometimes we have to do it twice, if the scarring doesn’t form right.”

You get a little time to be most unthrilled at that thought, and then another piece of metal is getting all invasive in your body cavities. It’s wide and cylindrical and _sharp_ , all covered in spikes that drag a hundred burning little lines of agony down the inside of your nook. You are as helpless to prevent yourself from trying to squirm away from it as a newly hatched wiggler, body responding on automatic. It don’t help none, though. She just keeps pushing until it’s in as far as your body will let it go.

Then, just when you almost adjust to the prickling heft of it in you, she starts twisting it. You’re fucking lost, you are gone, you’re carried away on a wave of the most profound pain you’ve ever been given to experience. It whites you out, it shorts you out, it scours every shred of thought from your pan and leaves your whole body hollow and crumbling. The spikes rake you deep as she twists and she goes so slow, so fucking slow, and you _thrash_ , shaking the chair and rattling your chains. All that does is drive them deeper in.

You hear a low, warbling animal cry, the sound of something in so much pain it’s like to just up and die, and you realize with a distant shock that it’s you.

Then you lose the thread of that thought, reality sliding all slippery out of your grasp, and it just hurts again. The entire world is narrowed down to the raking sear of agony inside of you. It goes on and on until you think it can’t, and then longer just to show you it can, until you’re half-convinced you’ve never not been in this much pain and you almost start to acclimate to it, the way you start to get used to the water just before you drown.

You don’t know if you pass out. You still feel it, but you’re not there, you’re somewhere floating in the dark inside of your own pan, and so you can’t tell how long it takes before you realize that the monstrous fucking thing she’d been raking your insides with is gone. The pain ebbs out like the tide, all slow and in and out still, but eventually you can see and breathe again and then you think you can probably even move, maybe. You realize suddenly you’re going to have to walk back to your room and you give a little sob.

She doesn’t burn none of this shut, which you think you can count as a bona fide motherfucking miracle. Instead she wads some gauze up inside you, which is about the opposite of what a miracle is, with the way it pushes all rough against the thousand thousand torn places. It helps with the bleeding though.

The priest more carries you than anything else this time. You shake like you’ve got fever chills and totter like the oldest motherfucker about to plough horns first into his own fucking grave hole and somehow manage to get up to your room. 

Karkat’s there and he makes some most unruly noises as soon as the stink of blood and hurt on you hits his nostrils, but you hardly even hear it. You just cant forward and fall into your bed and turn over to lay, staring woozily up at the ceiling.

He gets over to you and lays himself all tight against your side, little hands fluttering nervously everywhere over you, papping your face and petting your hair and running fingernails in slow lines up the length of your horns. That goes a long way towards loosening up the tight panicky pain knot in your chest.

“What the hell, Gamzee?” You shake your head. You are in no mood for talk. You don’t know if you can even make a noise that isn’t a sad slow groan and you don’t want to try.

He gets it, because that’s just how things are working between you two. You’re two in sync motherfuckers and it makes you glow, it does, to think of it. The pain isn’t less but you still feel years better with him there, all little and fierce and hot and worried to the tips of his precious nubby fucking horns over you.

It’s nearly morning and you’re exhausted, but you’re also still all edgy with adrenaline and you can’t quite fall asleep. The pain marching steady up your spine keeps you up too. Karkat tries to stay awake with you, but you feel him go lax and start breathing all slow and smooth and deep after a while, that fight lost. You don’t really mind. Wasn’t like you two were talking much, anyway, and he’s still there.

You guess you drift a little, because you lose some snatches of time. You dream strange dreams you can’t tell from reality, people touching you and voices and pain and metal and Karkat, all melding together into a big soundless bubble. 

This one takes a lot longer to heal. You have to have Karkat help you get the first lump of gauze out and put in fresh, because halfway through pulling on it you about pass out and lay there whining at the ceiling until he takes pity and does it for you. His hands shake and he hisses some unkind shit under his breath, but doesn’t say boo to you about it, so you figure that’s basically okay. You’re not feeling very kind about it right at first either.

You don’t know if you’re sick or just laid flat with the pain and dizzy from blood loss, but after a day you think you finally come onto the real meaning of it. You come into some knowing you are sure is true of why it’s sacred, how this is holy. You hurt so fucking bad that you’re transcendant with it. You hurt so much you can’t remember not hurting, and in your pain is joy too, and ecstasy, and the vast world of unfathomable wild dreams you pick secrets like flowers up from. This is the meaning of existing, you figure, the very basest most rude kind of being to ever happen, where you are just flayed out flat and you _feel_ , nothing but animal nerve response and dumb neural sparks, nothing but the purest way your body can react to anything.

You weep with the understanding and you’re not even ashamed, and you just smile at it when Karkat jolts all alarmed and tries to ask what’s wrong. You tell him when he asks again like he’s really worried you’ve popped off your own fucking nug that it’s nothing, nothing at all, except you have just realized a miracle. The miracle, the truest miracle, the first motherfucking miracle anyone ever gave to any little thing that lived up in the oceans that you’re all descended from.

The first couple of days are the absolute worst, where you can’t hardly do anything but lay in bed and slide in and out of being conscious and ponder the cracks in your ceiling, mostly. Then you start to come back to yourself a little, when you start regaining all that blood and your body starts knitting together a little. 

You still can’t really walk without wanting to lay down and die, so you don’t go to schoolfeeding, but you’re more awake and it makes Karkat happier. You practice moving around your room when he’s gone, so he doesn’t have to watch you hobbling, because his face gets that crumpled in look whenever he does that makes your bloodpusher ache.

It never quite stops hurting, which you get is the motherfucking point, but it’s one thing to hear that and then another to still have that ache up inside you and be told you have to be walking up and around to your lessons again. Whenever you start to feel harsh about it though, you remind yourself of the shit you realized about the first miracle and then every odd pull of scar tissue between your legs makes you smile a little.

The pulling is almost the worst. It just feels motherfucking weird, all tight and painful to stretch and hard like nothing up in there should _be_. One day a while after you get back to lessons you sit up on your bed and hike a leg up so you can get your fingers in there and feel around. 

Karkat blurts out the funniest strangled squawking noise you’ve ever heard, like someone stepping on a honkbeast. You laugh so hard at that that tears come out your eyes and you fall back against the wall, and you can’t even keep doing what you were because your arms don’t wanna listen to you.

“What in the name of every bulgerotted fucking dog your ancestors pailed with do you think you’re doing?” he demands, cheeks burning red and mouth all set like he isn’t embarrassed.

“Aw shit, you fucking _honked_ , do it again...”

“ _Gamzee Makara_.” He stands there with his hands braced on his hips and looms all over you and twists his face up into a real impressive scowl. “What are you doing. Why are you fingering yourself in the middle of our room in the middle of the night?”

“Aw, b-bro, it’s p-p-practically, hahaha fuck, no, sorry, sorry!” He snatches your pillow up and gives you a thwack across the face with it, so you try to calm yourself down some, even though he’s the cutest damn thing you can even think of when he gets all indignant like this. “Practically time to sleep, man, but anyway, uhhh, I wanted to see what it felt like?”

He just looks at you with that look he gets when someone’s being really dumb, like maybe he thinks someone took out their thinkpan and put a slug in there and he’s working out whether or not he’s pissed or just feels sorry for them.

“‘Cause it still pulls and it feels all motherfucking weird and I guess it’s all scared up and uhhh, I wanted to get my motherfucking feel on, since I can’t really see.” You shrug. “That’s all.” 

He relents some, sitting down heavily on the bed next to you and sighing, pillow bunched up in his lap. He plucks at it all fussy like. “I guess it makes sense to see how it’s healing.” He still gets so fucking awkward about this, but you can get your appreciation on that he’s trying not to say none of the negative thoughts you know he’s up and got towards it.

“Yeah, exactly,” you say. Then you wait, just to make sure he doesn’t have more, and figure that’s about as good as him saying he’s not gonna get salty with you over it. You hike your leg back up, knee nearly against your shoulder, and lean your back against the wall while your fingers get their wicked exploration on.

You mostly don’t ever touch yourself unless you’re cleaning. No real point to it. Mostly you don’t want to, especially since all your junk’s been in a pretty constant state of hurting ever since that first pailing. The landscape feels familiar and alien at the same time, your seedflap looser than it’s ever been before, which you aren’t sure whether that’s because of puberty or because of getting cut, and your nook definitely open wider than it should be. Without your bulge it kind of dents in up at the top of it and feels weird to touch, like where a missing tooth used to be.

You get your fingers sliding properly up inside your nook and sweep them all slow around, wiggling a little to get a better angle. The scars are all thick slippery lumps of hard tissue jutting out against your fingers. You imagine like you can read them, like maybe a blind troll could, and wonder what they’d say. Mostly you just feel, pressing and stroking and wondering at how changed it is. The skin between the scars is thin and kind of wet, almost like the inside of your cheek but a little rougher, and still sensitive. Touching it feels good, but it’s all mute and vague.

Beside you, Karkat shifts. You decide to go ahead and have some mercy and pull your fingers out, going to get your pants, when he stops you.

“Could. Uh.” He’s practically pink, staring fixedly at the floor and grinding his teeth together hard enough you can see his jaw flexing.

“Yeah?”

“Could. Can I? Feel?” 

You can’t even talk for a second. Fuck you if that isn’t sweet as sugar. “Yeah, sure, of course.” You do a little shifting so your back is against your headboard and your legs are spread around him, so he doesn’t have to get on the floor or nothing. “Don’t even have to ask to be touching any part of me, brother, you’ve got blanket fucking permission for that.”

He turns and reaches out like he thinks you’ll run away if he does it too fast, hand shaky. At first he touches just your seedflap, real slow and gentle, barely grazing you with his fingertips, and then he gets a finger in your nook proper and crooks it a little.

“Whoa.” He sounds more stunned than anything. His face is blankly mortified, but as he keeps moving his finger around, turning and wiggling and stroking a little more firmly at your scarred walls, it changes to a look of deep pity.

“Haha, yeah, for sure.” You chuckle and try not to feel nervous, but there are butterflies taking a first flight all the fuck around inside your ribs. Karkat’s rubbing all over your scars in the most sensitive and intimate part of you, and he’s doing it with that look on his face like he wants to put you in a jar and keep you. The only way it could get more romantic is if he licked them.

He doesn’t do that, but he lays a kiss on your thigh, just above your knee, before pulling away and settling back against the wall.

“...Put your pants back on,” he says eventually, and it occurs to you that yeah, you’re just laying there pantless and spread-legged, and you maybe flush a little as you do. “Wow. That - does it hurt?”

You swivel back around and lean up against him. “Yeah. Not real bad, like, but it aches when I walk and gets pretty bad if I run or sit wrong or something. Scars’ll are tight as fuck.”

“Gamzee,” he sighs, turning his head into your neck and breathing it out over your throat. You wait for more. “Gamzee.”

You guess that’s all there is, then. You pet at his head, fluffing the back of his hair up and then smoothing it down, and think you can’t wait until you’re old enough to be officially pale with him. Pale as the fucking moon, white as milk. You love this boy like nothing else you can put a name to.

Only a few evenings later, your priest shows up again. You may have been making a show of hobbling around because it made Karkat fuss over you, but you stand straight and try to match his strides as best you can and try not to wince. You’re starting to hit a growth spurt and your legs are getting pretty long, which doesn’t help in the area of learning how to not split yourself open crotchfirst just by walking, because sometimes you accidentally just forget and take these big motherfucking steps that make it feel like someone’s pailing you with a chainsaw.

You’re pretty sure he notices. He doesn’t slow down, though, and when you get down to the ablutions chamber he says he’s proud of how you’re progressing and that you’re very nearly done and officially a new subjugglator. You choke up with excitement at that, get your pipes all good and blocked with anticipation, and stay silent through being washed and led to the room.

The stirrups spread your legs uncomfortably apart, but you don’t think to peep a complaint on it. The woman welcomes you back with one of her husky laughs and then gets down to the business of inspecting you, just with her hands and fingers, doing about the same as you and Karkat did a few days ago.

“Very nice,” she pronounces finally. “How does it feel?”

“Hurts, some,” you tell her. “Pulls like a motherfucker when I walk.”

She nods like that’s all good. “Very nice. Very good. We’ll be all done here, after this, then.”

You’re almost not sure how you feel about that. Glad, to be sure, and excited because of what it being over means, but you’ve nearly gotten used to making these visits.

“This shouldn’t be so hard, but you have to make sure to hold still for this part. Very important.” She smacks the inside of your knee to demonstrate.

You nod and then lean your head back and count the tiles on the ceiling, going still and as relaxed as you can. You hardly even jump when she swabs you down clean, and you almost don’t notice she’s started until the second jab of the needle. Once you’re attention’s on it, though, you realize that it’s not exactly a walk on the beach. 

She works with neat, precise little stitches and this, at least, she does relatively quickly, with a looping grace. Whatever she’s using as thread has to be pretty strong, since it’ll be there for a while, and it feels smoother than you imagine actual thread would.

“We’ll be sewing up your nook and seedflap both,” she says. “Aside from being uncomfortable, the thread’s made for long-term wear and not likely to break on you unless you’re doing something extreme. Of course, you’ll want to come back and have it redone every so often, but we’ll get to that when we get to it.”

None of the individual jabs hurt that much, exactly, or at least not near as much as anything else she’s done to you, but by the time she’s halfway down the slit of your nook you’re shaking, and by the time she finishes every stitch makes your breath stutter out hard.

She blots at you with an alcohol-soaked cloth, which does make you jerk a little and earns you a reprimanding look, then starts in on your seedflap. You grit your teeth and try to figure out which hurts more. Your nook was more sensitive and the stitches tighter, but the skin of your seedflap is a lot thicker and she has to push the needle deeper through it.

It’s all miserable is what you end up deciding on, by the time she finishes. It’s not like the blinding agony of the last two times, but it still pulses with a deep, hot pain that you know won’t leave for fucking ever, will keep you up until you want to scream into the day, will keep you all distracted and snappish through the night.

It’s all worth it, you think as you stand up on shaky legs. Worth every drop of blood and ounce of flesh lost, worth every scalpel slice and needle prick. Your first steps as a proper subjugglator are short shuffling things, trying to get used to all the conflicting ways everything pulls when you move your legs, but you feel triumphant enough to make up for it.

The rest of the day is spent in prayer, alone on your own in a little boxy room. The floor is fingerbone spirals and the walls blood painting, wicked pictures splashed straight onto the stone. Prayer incense, thick and sickly sweet, winds its way around you. You commune about your pain and what you’ve learned and how you feel and what your motherfucking future is to be, which is the same as you always knew. You’re the ticket man, the stub ripper, the toll taker, who lets all the blessed and lucky into the Carnival.

Now, more than ever, you are sure of your role. It’s a sweet feeling, to slot neatly into the place that’s been kept waiting for you. Your hatchright is hanging right there for you to claim, ripe low fruit so swollen with its succulence you don’t even have to pick it, just wait for it to drop into your waiting hands.

Your legs are numb from kneeling when the priest comes back and it takes a long time to surface from the inside of your own head. You meditate swirling in your skull, leaning back and dropping down through cloud layers of all the righteous realizations you get going on, and coming back out of is sometimes a chore. It takes adjusting to remember how to move your body and exist in space, and sometimes still you just up and plumb fucking forget not to start wandering back down all those uncovered corridors of your mind.

You space out some on the way back up. Every step reminds you of what you’ve become, and once you start thinking about it you just can’t stop, turning the new fact over and over in your mind to examine every new and gleaming edge. _I’m a subjugglator_. It’s in the tug of thread in your flesh, the ache of scar tissue pulling with your stride, this new secret sacrament you share with the other faithful around you, proof of holy hatching stitched right into you.

You go to your room just long enough to get hurriedly dressed and then it’s off to schoolfeeding. You still walk all ginger and careful and you get looks for it, but you pay them no more mind than you do any of the little carapaced critters scuttling around by your feet. They’re beneath your concern, they are below your purview, they are in your mental files as no fucks given.

Barely you can even participate in your lessons, concentration all scatter shot elsewhere. You’re too giddy with new excitement. Karkat’ll tell you later anyway, after you tell him what you’ve finally up and gotten through. You can see the question written in his face every time he looks at you, but he no more asks than you’re going to tell out here, in the middle of all everyone. It kills you just as much to keep silent, ‘til you’re about squirming with it.

Back in your room for the day, he fronts all like he doesn’t want to ask. He fidgets with his bedcovers, he fidgets with his clothes, he starts to read a book and stares at the same page for ten minutes. You lay out and get yourself acquainted with how that feels.

“Okay, so what fresh new horror has been visited upon your blighted crotch now?” he finally asks. “Or did they decide they were done carving bits out of you?”

“About done with the carving, yeah, brother.” Your draw your legs up and shift around, wiggling your loose pants off. You’re not going to be wearing anything tighter for a while, that’s for sure. “Got me some motherfucking holy writ now, come look.”

He walks over to you with a wary weariness, all tight with fear that he’s going to have to witness some new hurt, but when he gets there and looks you can see by the relaxed slump of his shoulders he doesn’t feel too badly about it. He sits next to you and thumbs over the stitches, counting the bumps with his fingerpads.

“You’re insane. I mean that sincerely, by the way. That’s not an insult, just an honest assessment of your level of sanity and rationality, which is actually a value _less than_ zero. You are a completely shithive maggots, around the bend, mother _fucking_ lunatic.” It comes out of him all slow and almost solemn, like a pronouncement, while he rubs over your new stitches, pushing a little here and there to see how much give they have.

You take his hand and kiss all his knuckles. “A brother’s got to go with what feels right to him in his chestpump, you know that. It would be motherfucking crazy not to. What’s even the point then, man, spending your whole lfe denying what your self all wants? That’s insane.”

“No, willingly mutilating yourself for shitty clown gods is crazy. But whatever, it’s done. Is this all? Hard to see what _else_ they could do but I’m sure you guys could figure something out. Maybe next you can file down your horns!”

You draw him in against your side and pat his side. “This is it. Now I’m finally being what I was always meant to up and be. Everything’s just how it motherfucking should be, and you know why?”

He groans and buries his head against your shoulder. “Don’t start.”

“Come on, my brother,” you needle, fighting to keep the grin out of your voice. You get all preachy serious as you can. “Do you motherfucking _know_ why the truth of which I’ve just imparted to you is motherfucking _being_ a thing that’s true? Do you have that knowing, brother?”

“Gamzee, for fuck’s sake...”

“I asked up to you a motherfucking _question_ , and I expect from your mouth to come an _answer_. Why’s all this shit being true?”

“Is it stupid shitty dumb miracles?”

“That’s right.” You get him by the chin and tilt his face up to you and lean in to kiss on his pursed little mouth. “Do you motherfucking _notice_ and _recognize_ miracles? Because they are all around you, if you stop to look, this is the righteous truth.”

He lays a kiss back on you and then pushes you away, grimacing. “Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. Everything is miracles always. The fact that I haven’t strangled you is a miracle.”

You flop down on your pillows with your body curled all around him. “Except I know you love me.”

Karkat sighs all defeated, shifting down until he’s got his back all leaned up against you. “I still don’t know why. You drive me to murder on a daily basis.”

“Love you too, to the fucking moon and back.” Sometimes you feel stupid sick with it, with how most of the time you just want to grab him and hug him and never let go of him.

About maybe a month later, after you’re all settled with yourself and getting into your new training pretty good, you wake up and he’s got this dizzy heavy kind of scent coming off him. It pricks sweat at the nape of your neck and makes your stomach do slow trembly flips and every inch of him look like it needs your hands on it right fucking now.

You guess this is how you must’ve been smelling up to him, and you can’t really blame him for getting up in bed with you. If you didn’t have to head off so soon for schoolfeeding, you’d probably spend the whole day just licking the taste of heat off his skin.

You don’t know what the policy is for kids with no quadrants who aren’t purple. You definitely don’t know what it is for mutants, who can’t give to the slurry anyway, even if they don’t get culled none no more. Probably it’s nothing, probably he’ll just get to left to his own devices, but you can’t shake the fright that grips you that someone’ll come to put him down in a half lit room and get him pailed til he’s wrung out dry.

So that night you get him all in your lap and kiss into his mouth and let him grind against you and wrap yourself around him, all soothing cool. He’s motherfucking beautiful and it twinges some when you think about it, a hot little pain flash from up between your legs, but mostly you don’t feel it much physically. Karkat feels it enough for both of you, you figure, and this way you can get your appreciation on to all his pretty noises so much better without being lost up in your own need.

No one does get any business up with him. You almost feel selfish keeping him to yourself, with how sweet he gets all plastered hot and whining against you, breathing please against your lips, and you almost feel like it might be heretical, to partake of this pleasure when it’s been made so clear you’re barred. But he’s Karkat and you love him and if you’re selfish, then you’ll be selfish, and keep him yours in every way he’ll let you.

“Wish I could’ve made you feel this,” he sighs against you once, in your lap with your fingers curled up inside him. 

You try not to let it ache none when you think about that or how your hatchright stole up a way for you to be his from him. You’re his in every other way, so what’s the one little one?

Nothing much, you decide. Nothing much at all, less than nothing, when weighed against the way he feels draped all boneless and worn out against you, breath puffing against your shoulder and body still shivering from aftershocks. He fits so perfectly against you, heart pounding against your chest, and his touch is so delicate when he rubs a thumb over the line of your stitches you don’t even think about flinching, no matter how vulnerable it makes you. It’s written in the motherfucking stars. That one little thing’s no matter.


End file.
